ASR or FULL Backup

[Guest]

I am trying to make a disaster recovery plan using ntbackup in case my hard
drive died. I have scheduled a full backup and differential backups to a tape
drive. These seem to work. I then ran the ASR and created a floppy disk and a
tape. My next step was to borrow a replacement hard drive and test my plan. I
used my XP cd the floppy drive and the tape and all seemed ok untill 2hr 30
minutes later when the tape stopped loading and I rebooted I received the
dreaded ntldr missing mesage. I used recovery console and accessed the hard
drive ntldr was there? I tried another hard disk as I thought it may be
faulty but the same thing happened. I installed xp from my cd then restored
the last full backup but this also rendered my disk unbootable. Has anyone
had any success with ASR or Full restores?

 

[Rock]

I am trying to make a disaster recovery plan using ntbackup in case my hard
drive died. I have scheduled a full backup and differential backups to a tape
drive. These seem to work. I then ran the ASR and created a floppy disk and a
tape. My next step was to borrow a replacement hard drive and test my plan. I
used my XP cd the floppy drive and the tape and all seemed ok untill 2hr 30
minutes later when the tape stopped loading and I rebooted I received the
dreaded ntldr missing mesage. I used recovery console and accessed the hard
drive ntldr was there? I tried another hard disk as I thought it may be
faulty but the same thing happened. I installed xp from my cd then restored
the last full backup but this also rendered my disk unbootable. Has anyone
had any success with ASR or Full restores?

Yes but not from tape, and I find the process very slow and clunky. I
went to Drive Image from Powerquest, which has since been bought out by
Symantec and the technology incorporated in the latest version of Ghost.
Other options are Acronis True Image and Terabyte Unlimited's Image
for Windows.

 

[GTS]

I've been successful with full restores (haven't tested ASR enough to say).
Did you select to include the System State in the backup? That's a
necessity. I'm not sure why else your last case would have failed unless
there were file errors in the restore.

All in all, disk imaging software is preferable to ntbackup, but it should
work. I don't the reliability of tapes and strongly recommend rotating
multiple tapes if that's your backup mechanism.